Dark of the Moon

for his pistol, and put it on the seat next to him. As he stopped and parked, he picked up the weapon, as if picking up a pen or a book, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
    When he climbed out of the truck, the man with the gun called, “Who’re you?”
    “Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to see Reverend Feur.”
    “You got an appointment?” the man asked. He was maybe twenty-five, and had the foxy look of somebody who’d grown up hungry.
    “Nope.”
    “Maybe you could come back some other time. He’s pretty busy,” the man said.
    “I’d rather talk now,” Virgil said. “If I’ve got to drag my ass all the way back to Bluestem, then when I come back, I’ll come back with a search warrant and five deputies and we’ll tear this place apart.”
    “You ain’t got no cause.” The shotgun was there, but the man hadn’t twitched it in any direction: it was simply there.
    “You think a Stark County judge would give a shit?” Virgil asked.
    The man stared at him for a moment, as if calculating the inclinations of every judge he’d ever met, then said, “Wait here.”
     
    I T HADN ’ T BEEN obvious from the road, but Feur’s house and the outbuildings were actually sitting on the slope, which continued back to the east, but flattened out across the road to the west. To the north and south, you could see forever: and they’d been able to see Virgil’s dust trail from virtually the time he rolled off the tarmac county road and onto the gravel, five miles away.
    Looking around, Virgil noticed the heavy tracking on the dirt side-yard, and the crushed grass around the perimeter of the dirt; it reminded him of the grass ad hoc parking at a county fair. There’d been a bunch of cars and trucks in the yard, all at once. A prayer meeting? The shop building off to his left was a leftover Quonset hut from the Korean War era, made out of steel. Wouldn’t defeat a rifle, maybe, but a pistol shot would bounce right off.
    A wooden Jesus, carved out of a cottonwood stump by somebody moderately handy with a chain saw, peered across the yard at him, one arm raised, as though blessing Feur’s enterprise.
     
    T HE MAN with the gun—now gunless—came out on the porch. “Come in,” he said.
    “Thank you.” Virgil nodded at him, climbed the three steps to the porch, said, “After you,” and followed the man into the house.
    Feur was sitting in a wooden rocker at the corner of the parlor, smoking, and drinking what looked like tea out of a china cup. A small man with black eyes, black beard, and a chiseled, sunburned nose, he was dressed all in black, and wore shiny black leather boots; in a movie, he would have played Mr. Scratch. There were two pictures on the walls, both of a black-haired, black-eyed Jesus, one on the cross.
    Feur said, “Mr. Flower? Do you have some identification?”
    Virgil nodded, took his ID out of his breast pocket, and held it out. Feur peered at it without touching, said, “Flowers,” then nodded at a couch and said, “Have a seat. You wouldn’t be related to Rusty Flowers, would you?”
    “No. I don’t know the name,” Virgil said. He sat down, lifting his jacket enough that he didn’t pin the gun under his leg.
    “Not even sure it’s a real name,” Feur said. He was younger than Virgil had expected—probably the same age as Stryker, in his middle thirties, but his lined face made him look, at first glance, as though he were ten years older. “I was standing on a bridge at Dubuque, Iowa, one time, and I saw a towboat named Rusty Flowers. Often wondered if it was a man, or just something that somebody made up.”
    They shared a few seconds of silence, then Feur asked, “So what do you want?”
    “You’ve probably heard that Bill Judd got burned up,” Virgil said.
    “That’s what I heard,” Feur said. He sighed, blew some smoke, tamped out the cigarette in an aluminum ashtray. “He was a bad man, but he was moving toward the Lord at the end. Too late, though. He hadn’t accepted Jesus last time I saw him; he was unwilling to take the step. I suspect Mr. Judd’s house fire was only a preliminary introduction to the flames he’s feeling right now.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that,” Virgil said.
    “I do know about that,” Feur said, and his black eyes glittered with what might have been humor. “What does Mr. Judd’s death have to do with me?”
    “I was hoping for a Revelation,” Virgil said.
    “You think I